Posts from The Cooking Cure

How is Week 2 of your Cooking Cure? How is lunch going? I sense a couple trends: Many of you are Bored With Lunch. Others of you snack your way through the afternoon. And then others, like Bright Lights, dutifully pack a lunch, but work gets in the way, and the nice lunch deteriorates in the fridge. Can you relate? Do you have any suggestions for Bright Lights and lunches that last well for a whole week in the fridge?

Yesterday for The Cooking Cure we asked you to ponder three important questions related to your lunch habits and what you want to change. Are you a bored luncher? Well-intentioned, but don't follow through? Or are you a serial lunch buyer?

We checked out the #cookingcure hashtag to see how Day 7's assignment went for you — here are some highlights!

Midweek check-in! How's making breakfast been going so far this week? (Oh, yeah, breakfast!) Are you still on target? If you need to need to tweak part of your breakfast plan, take a few minutes today to figure that out.

Back to lunches — today we're finally getting into the heart of it. Today is all about finding you some fresh, exciting new recipes that you can start making for lunch.

How sad is this lone chicken thigh? It's the only thing leftover from last night's dinner. We ate all the broccoli that went with it, and there wasn't much of the freekeh and butternut squash salad to begin with, so that's definitely gone. As I said yesterday, leftovers are my go-to lunch, and I'll be totally honest: if I wasn't making an effort this week to better my lunch habits, I would probably just heat this up, eat it for lunch, and call it a day. Ugh, terrible, I know.

This week The Cooking Cure tackles all things lunch. If you're sick of eating leftovers every day, are looking for fresh ideas, or simply want to bring your lunch to work, this is the week to hop on the bandwagon. Yesterday's assignment was to remember everything you had for lunch last week.

We checked out the #cookingcure hashtag to see how Day 6's assignment went for you — here are some highlights!

Lunch feels to me like one of the trickiest meals of the day — it's so easy for good intentions to go completely off the rails. There's the fact that most of us are somewhere outside our homes come lunchtime, so a homemade lunch means not only planning ahead but also actually making the meal ahead (not to mention remembering to bring it with us when we leave). Assuming those things happen, the lure of the food truck and lunch invites from co-workers can be too great to resist if our homemade meal isn't something exciting.

This is all just to keep things in perspective as we start talking about our lunch habits and how we want to change them. We're up against a lot! But don't be overwhelmed or intimidated — we'll just take it one step at a time.

All right, we're into Week 2 of The Cooking Cure, so it's all lunch, all the time. Except, lunch just means leftovers, right? Oh leftovers — sometimes delicious, sometimes worn-out, always convenient. We heard from a lot of you yesterday who said you're wishing you weren't so dependent on leftovers for lunch. Like sparklingsapphire, for instance.

When I worked in an office, lunch was always an eat-out affair. I was terrible about bringing lunch from home, so every day I'd head to the salad bar at Whole Foods, or I'd pick up a few tacos from the taqueria down the street. Then I'd go straight back to the office to eat at my desk.

Now that I work from home full-time, I hardly eat out for lunch anymore, but despite having a lovely dining table to sit at, most days I still eat at my desk. And the lunch itself? It changes every day.

Last week in The Cooking Cure we tackled all things breakfast. On the first day we asked readers to remember everything they had eaten for breakfast the week before, and on Friday (Day 5's assignment) we had readers make a new breakfast and plan ahead for the next week (so fun!). How did it go for you?

We checked out the #cookingcure hashtag to see how Day 5's assignment went for you — here are some highlights!